Integrate external search providers with EPiServer

A customer wants to know more about changing the regular EPiServer search provider to a solution using either Google Site Search or Microsoft Search Server.

My questions are: How complex is it to make these unintegrated search providers conform to EPiServer page property values? Say for instance, that I want to search pages within a given time span, such as course start and stop dates, or properties containing free text or category values. I'm guessing metadata will come into play somehow, but I have yet to find out how to make Google or Microsoft parse these values.

The customer is using EPiServer 4.6x so unfortunately the epicode provider EasySearch is not an option, otherwise I would probably have recommended that one.

Any pointers and recommendations would be most appreciated!Regards,/Marten

With MSS you add the data you want to be able to search as metadata, make som configurations and you'll be able to search that data. A problem that I've bumped into is that alla meta data crawled is saved as text, and it seems like you can't change it in the admin interface. So i'm not sure how it will handle timespan searches and sorting by int/datetime etc..

Another thing you could try is Google Mini...

If you are interested in MSS Ted Nyberg has two posts about it on his blog http://www.tednyberg.com